At Manhattan Preschool, Accounts of Sex Abuse Case Differ

Malthe Thomsen, a teaching student from Copenhagen, was rapidly becoming a fixture at the International Preschools in Midtown Manhattan. The beginning of his internship, in February, was celebrated with a lunch in his honor. And he was starting to take on more responsibility, accompanying children on field trips and helping them learn to draw.

But in late May, just as the academic year was wrapping up, a co-worker sent an email about Mr. Thomsen to a supervisor. “I feel compelled to report that I have observed certain peculiar behavior,” wrote an assistant teacher, Mariangela Kefalas — behavior that she said she believed bordered on “inappropriate touching of children.”

In a follow-up meeting with school officials, she accused Mr. Thomsen of touching girls under their dresses and placing children’s hands on his groin.

The school’s leaders were alarmed. They discreetly watched him and questioned his colleagues. But after a few days, when they did not turn up anything suspicious, they closed the investigation and fired Ms. Kefalas.

Mr. Thomsen, 22, kept his position at the International Preschools and started working in its summer program. But Ms. Kefalas, 28, persisted. She took her complaints to the authorities, and in late June, the police questioned him. Several hours later, they obtained a statement that prosecutors described as a confession. In it, Mr. Thomsen acknowledged sometimes placing children’s hands on his groin.

“I realized that there was something I did,” he said. “It’s really hard to take in that I did this.”

That was only the beginning. Anger among parents has swelled amid a dearth of information, and some families have hired lawyers to investigate. So has Ms. Kefalas, who said her firing constituted whistle-blower retaliation. Mr. Thomsen’s legal team has shot back, saying he is a victim — of a teacher who often complained about co-workers, and of detectives who improperly duped him into confessing to crimes he did not commit. The Danish news media has seized on the story, and school officials have brought in experts in public relations.

Mr. Thomsen has not been formally indicted; prosecutors are gathering evidence to present to a grand jury as soon as next month. His parents have mortgaged properties in Denmark to help pay the $400,000 bail for his release from the Rikers Island jail complex and are staying with him in Manhattan.

In a recent interview with a Danish television station, Mr. Thomsen denied the charges, saying that touching children in a sexual way was “something I have always thought is among the worst things anyone can do.”

“To hear that sort of accusation about oneself,” he said, “to be hit with those kinds of charges, it is really hard to hear.”

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Malthe Thomsen, an intern at the International Preschool in Midtown Manhattan, was accused by a co-worker of improperly touching students.

For Mr. Thomsen, preschool was the family trade: Both of his parents worked in early childhood education, and this fall, he hoped to earn a degree in education from University College Capital in Copenhagen.

Mr. Thomsen arrived at the International Preschools in February for a six-month internship. He worked at one of the school’s three locations, on East 45th Street, less than a block from the United Nations. The school, where full-day tuition is about $25,000 a year, is popular among doctors, lawyers and diplomats throughout New York City.

Mr. Thomsen spent most of his time at the school assisting Ms. Kefalas and two other teachers with 17 children, ages 4 and 5, in the Blue Room. He read books, worked with pupils on projects and helped supervise them on the playground.

The School’s Inquiry

Ms. Kefalas first noticed what she considered troubling behavior during a field trip to the Bronx Zoo in late May. She began surreptitiously documenting Mr. Thomsen’s interactions with children, recording about 10 videos of him on her cellphone, each about a minute long, according to Stephen M. Bourtin, one of her lawyers. The videos showed Mr. Thomsen hugging children and playing with them on his lap, but they were not sexually explicit, her lawyer said.

She told the school, Mr. Bourtin said, that she had seen Mr. Thomsen place children’s hands on his genitals over his clothing, and she described what she considered inappropriate touching of girls under their dresses on the playground, when, for example, he was helping them off the jungle gym. She described specific incidents, including the names of children, Mr. Bourtin said.

School officials consulted a lawyer and began an internal investigation. The inquiry involved sending a staff member into the Blue Room to observe Mr. Thomsen for five hours and interviewing five other school employees.

“The head teachers and other educators who spent significant time with the class all said they had not observed any inappropriate behavior on the part of the intern and were highly complimentary of his work with the children,” the school’s director, Donna Cohen, later said in an email to parents, one of seven sent in the days after the arrest. The school noted that it had received several letters of recommendation for Mr. Thomsen.

When the school told Ms. Kefalas that it had turned up no corroboration for her claims, she said she had additional evidence. The school asked to see the evidence. She refused, and as a result, was fired for insubordination, said Marcia Horowitz of Rubenstein Associates, the public relations firm hired by the school.

Ms. Kefalas did not show the evidence — the cellphone videos — to the school, her lawyer said, on the advice of a friend, also a lawyer, who told her that she should show them only to the police.

“Ms. Kefalas should certainly not be punished for looking out for the interests of the young children under her care,” Mr. Bourtin said.

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The school where Mr. Thomsen worked, at 330 East 45th Street, is less than a block from the United Nations. It is popular among doctors, lawyers and diplomats throughout the city.CreditYana Paskova for The New York Times

Prosecutors have called the school’s investigation “totally insufficient,” and parents have expressed concern that they were not initially told of the allegations. The school did not notify the authorities; under state law, only public schools are required to do so in cases of alleged child abuse by staff members.

Police Investigate

Shortly after she was fired, Ms. Kefalas went to the authorities herself. She also showed them her cellphone videos.

Mr. Thomsen, meanwhile, had started working in the summer program. But around 6 a.m. on June 27, the police showed up at Mr. Thomsen’s apartment in Harlem and took him in for questioning.

After about seven hours, Mr. Thomsen offered his statement, and he was arrested. He was accused of taking children’s hands and placing them on his genitals over his clothing on nine occasions, and pressing the head of a 10th child against his genitals over his clothing.

In addition, he was accused of three times placing a child’s buttocks against his genitals over clothing. If convicted of even a single count of first-degree sexual abuse, he could face a prison term of two to seven years.

The evening of Mr. Thomsen’s arrest, police officers were dispatched to the homes of students to ask parents to bring in their children for interviews.

Police officials would not comment on Mr. Thomsen’s interrogation. But a lawyer for Mr. Thomsen, Jane H. Fisher-Byrialsen, said the police used deceptive techniques to intimidate him. She said Mr. Thomsen was not accustomed to the hard-nosed tactics of American law enforcement. She said they told him that they had videos of his lewd behavior and that, unlike child rapists who were locked away for many years, he could simply seek treatment for his problems in Denmark. (It is unclear whether such videos exist; prosecutors would not comment on the evidence they had gathered.)

In the television interview, Mr. Thomsen said he trusted the police and was confused by the suggestion that they had seen videos of him improperly touching children. “I couldn’t remember having done any of the things they said I had done,” he said.

Under New York State law, the police are allowed to lie when questioning suspects, so long as they are not coercive. Stephen J. Schulhofer, a law professor at New York University, said that lying about the existence of videos or fingerprints was a standard technique. “Even if there is never any hint of having a video, they can make it all up and say, ‘How do you explain that?’ ” he said.

Mr. Schulhofer said the police might have crossed a line if they suggested that the only consequence for Mr. Thomsen would be treatment at a clinic, which could prompt a false confession, but he noted that it was unclear exactly what was said during the interrogation.

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Malthe Thomsen’s parents, Birgitte Thomsen, left, and Marianne Larsen have come to New York from Denmark to help their son. They mortgaged properties so he could be released on bail.CreditKarsten Moran for The New York Times

Prosecutors said the interrogation was not recorded by the police. But at a bail hearing this month, Rachel Ferrari, a prosecutor, said Mr. Thomsen “was never tricked or manipulated into making these statements.”

In his statement to prosecutors, which lasted about an hour, Mr. Thomsen could not say how many children he had inappropriately touched and was sometimes conditional in his responses, according to a transcript reviewed by The New York Times.

But he talked about how he felt pleasure after he brought the children’s hands to his lap, mostly during play time, when they worked with Legos or magnetic tiles on the floor.

“I recognize that it’s an absolutely disgusting thing,” he said in the statement. “I am not myself sure about why I would do such a thing.”

Ms. Fisher-Byrialsen said the confession was flawed. “If he did this,” Ms. Fisher-Byrialsen said, “he would have these vivid memories of it.” She has also sought in court to question Ms. Kefalas’s credibility, saying that she routinely lodged complaints against co-workers.

This month, after reviewing a video of his statement to prosecutors, a Manhattan judge found there was probable cause to believe that Mr. Thomsen had committed a felony and ordered him held in jail. A few days later, Mr. Thomsen was granted bail.

The Manhattan district attorney’s office must indicate on Aug. 15 whether it has presented or will present its case to a grand jury for indictment.

Parents Seek Facts

Prosecutors have asked to interview pupils at the school; some parents have resisted, worried about causing trauma to their children.

A few parents have said privately that they are skeptical about the charges. Still, they remain concerned, and several families have hired Jeff Herman, a Miami lawyer who specializes in cases of sexual abuse, to begin investigating. Some parents have circulated a petition calling for the firing of the school’s top administrators, including Ms. Cohen, for failing to notify the authorities and parents when the complaints surfaced.

Mr. Thomsen’s friends and family back home have raised more than $50,000 to help pay his legal fees. His case has caught the attention of Danish journalists, who have commented on the harsh conditions at Rikers, where Mr. Thomsen had been held.

In the television interview with Denmark’s DR News, Mr. Thomsen said his situation reminded him of a 2012 Danish movie, “The Hunt,” which depicts a kindergarten teacher who is ostracized after he is wrongly accused of sexually abusing a girl in his class. Mr. Thomsen said he had watched the movie during his time in New York.

“It has always been one of my worst nightmares,” he said, “that I might be accused of doing something like that.”

A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 22 of the New York edition with the headline: At Manhattan Preschool, Accounts of Sex Abuse Case Differ. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe